Duncan Garner: Parents don’t want announcements. They want classrooms

The guts of it

1. Education Minister Erica Stanford says the Government has funded nearly 1,400 new classrooms and learning spaces since taking office, with another 133 announced for Auckland and 24 for the upper North Island.

2. Stanford says the Government has saved $300 million by moving away from bespoke classroom designs and using repeatable, off-site manufactured builds.

3. She says school property is being moved out of the Ministry of Education and into a Crown entity, after hundreds of promised projects could not be funded.

This is one of those stories that sounds boring until you remember what it is actually about.

It is not really about concrete, gib board, procurement models, off-site manufacturing or some Wellington spreadsheet buried inside a ministry basement.

It is about kids.

Kids sitting in overcrowded classrooms. Kids being taught in spaces that were never designed to be classrooms. Kids in fast-growing suburbs where the houses went up, the people arrived, the babies became school children, and the classrooms somehow did not follow.

How does that happen?

How does a country like New Zealand, with all our public servants, all our consultants, all our reports, all our strategies, all our delivery units, fail to fund and build the most basic thing a school needs?

A room.

A teacher needs a room. Kids need a room. A school needs enough rooms.

It is not complicated.

And yet, somehow, school property became another classic New Zealand failure. Too slow, too expensive, too bespoke, too bureaucratic, too much talking, not enough building.

Education Minister Erica Stanford came on the show and laid out the numbers. The Government has announced $160 million for new classrooms. That includes 133 additional classrooms through Auckland and another 24 across the North Island, with more also coming in Wellington and the South Island.

Stanford told me: “In the last three years we’ve funded almost 1,400, but today we’re announcing an additional 133 classrooms through Auckland and another 24 across the North Island.”

Now, I pushed her on that word, because politicians love the language of delivery. They fund projects. They announce projects. They issue press releases. Parents want actual classrooms with actual doors, actual desks and actual teachers standing at the front.

When I asked whether these classrooms were completed, built and full of kids, Stanford clarified that the Government had funded them. Some have been built. Some are in construction. Some are still to come.

“We’ve delivered funding for them,” she said. “A lot of those have been built. Some of them are in construction at the moment, and some of them are just about to be delivered.”

That matters.

Because this cannot become another announcement cycle. The standard here is not how many classrooms are announced. The standard is how many are built.

Still, there is a shift here, and it is worth acknowledging.

Stanford says the old way was mad. Classrooms costing about $1.2 million each. Bespoke designs. Architectural bells and whistles. Beautiful, perhaps. Award-winning, maybe. But when you have growing rolls and kids bursting out of the place, you do not need a classroom that wins a design prize.

You need one that works.

Warm. Dry. Safe. Basic.

Those are not ugly words. They are the right words.

Stanford put it bluntly. “We were designing architecturally designed, beautiful classrooms that all had the bells and whistles that you don’t need to win design awards with, because you just need a functional classroom.”

Exactly.

She says the Government has saved $300 million by moving to repeatable, off-site manufactured designs. Build the same kind of classroom again and again. Manufacture them off-site. Truck them in. Get them up. Use the savings to build more.

That is not anti-education. That is pro-common sense.

And honestly, where was this thinking years ago?

We have allowed too much of the public sector to become addicted to complexity. Everything needs a framework, a bespoke design, a consultation phase, a second consultation phase, a review, a reset, a steering group, a cultural overlay, an options paper, a ministerial briefing, and then, after all that, some poor principal is still waiting for two classrooms and a toilet block.

Stanford says these new classrooms can be built faster because they are made off-site.

“These are offsite, manufactured, and repeatable designs,” she said. “So warm, dry, safe classrooms we can build quickly and cost effectively so we can do more.”

She gave the example of Wellington Girls, where she said students went away for the Christmas break and returned to 16 double-storey classrooms delivered in just a few weeks.

That is the sort of urgency schools have needed for years.

Then came the jaw-dropper.

Stanford told me that when she became minister, officials initially said there were about 20 school projects that had been promised but could not be funded. Then the number became 100. Then 200. Then 352.

“The number, over a period of a month, went from 20 to 100 to 200 to 352 projects that they had promised that they could not deliver because there wasn’t enough money,” she said. “And so there was a meltdown.”

That is not a hiccup. That is not a small accounting error. That is a system failure.

If you have promised hundreds of school projects and cannot pay for them, that is a crisis.

If you have schools waiting, principals guessing, parents wondering, and kids squeezed, that is a crisis.

And here is the big structural move: school property is being taken out of the Ministry of Education and put into a Crown entity with a professional board.

Stanford said the reason was simple: “Very expensive classrooms, bespoke, architecturally designed, over promising, under delivering, which is why we are taking property out of the ministry, putting it into a Crown entity run by a professional board of people who know what they’re doing.”

Good.

The Ministry of Education should focus on education. Curriculum. Achievement. Attendance. Learning support. Teacher supply. Literacy. Numeracy. The stuff that actually happens inside the classroom.

The property side has clearly become too big, too technical and too expensive to be run as just another branch of the ministry machine.

Stanford is right about value for money too. Taxpayers are not an ATM. Parents are not stupid. They can see waste. They can smell it. And when they are told there is no money for this, no money for that, no money for maintenance, but then hear classrooms were being individually designed like boutique holiday homes, they are entitled to ask: who signed this off?

The Kumeū example matters too.

West Auckland has been screaming out for more capacity. Stanford says this Budget funds the second stage of a new secondary school in Kumeū.

“We’ve already purchased the land,” she said. “This budget will be designing the school, and then in future budgets we’ll be delivering that much-needed school out in West Auckland.”

That is planning ahead. Finally.

But let’s not get carried away. This is not mission accomplished. Stanford herself admitted there are still hundreds of classrooms under the line.

When I asked how many classrooms short the country is, she said: “There’s hundreds on the list underneath the line that we had to draw with the budget that we had.”

That is the real pressure point.

Schools are coping for now, she says, using additional spaces. That is the polite version. The real version is that schools are making do.

And schools are always making do.

They make do with old buildings. They make do with leaky blocks. They make do with libraries turned into learning spaces. They make do with temporary rooms. They make do with staff who keep smiling because the kids are watching.

That is why this cannot just be a better procurement story. It has to be a funding and building story.

Stanford says all of the latest classrooms will be in construction by the end of the year and predominantly completed early next year. Some will be straightforward. Others, like the 18-classroom block at Mount Albert Grammar, are more complicated.

Fair enough.

But the test is brutally simple.

A parent does not care which entity owns the project. They do not care whether it is Ministry-led, Crown entity-led, Treasury-approved or Cabinet-noted.

They care whether their kid has a decent classroom.

After years of waste, delay and overpromising, that is the standard Stanford should be judged against.

Not how many classrooms were announced.

How many were funded.

How many were built.

How many were opened.

How many kids walked in, sat down, and finally had the space they should have had all along.

That is delivery.

Everything else is just talk.